Fall in love with pupusas at 6th Ave’s new Salvadoran-Mexican restaurant

One by one. Pat by pat. Pupusa after handmade pupusa.

“It was so hard to make pupusas — I cried!” recalled Ofelia Amaya, sitting at a table inside her family’s second restaurant, Balcon Express, which in December replaced Old Milwaukee Cafe on Tacoma’s Sixth Avenue.

Though she is from Guadalaraja, her husband Mario, a lifelong Tacoman, has family in El Salvador. There, pupusas are everything. He and his mother shared their family recipe and their technique with Amaya, but he was particular, she said. It couldn’t be too big, too small, too thick, too thin, too wet or too dry.

As she has since taught her staff — one of whom insisted she would quit before finding her stride as a pupusa virtuoso — creating El Salvador’s national dish involves a certain kind of trust.

“Cierra tus ojos y siente la masa,” she said, meaning “close your eyes and feel the masa.”

In other words: “See with your hands.”

The dough is simple, like a tortilla, composed solely of masa and water — not even salt. But it’s thicker, and each begins with a ball that’s flattened, rolled and pinched by hand like both a dumpling and a cookie. The thick edges disguise its contents, here of generous portions of cheese and spinach, pork or refried beans.

On my first visit, Amaya’s daughter Mariana, who also manages the Tacoma restaurant, recommended the revueltas, a traditional trio of pork, cheese and refried beans. To my delight, the filling wriggled out of the masa here and there and onto the grill, rendering several crispy, burnt-cheese attachés. The result is imperfect but endearing, and most importantly, delicious.

“Oh yes, the best part are the crunchy bits!” said Mariana Amaya.

The pupusas are cooked on both sides for a few minutes, growing to golden-brown and puffing up. “That’s how you know they’re ready,” she noted.

Top with the accompanying curtido, a sharp, house-pickled slaw of cabbage and jalapeno, and mild salsa. Don’t bother with the plastic silverware; like their journey to this paper plate, they are best by hand.

Since opening just a few weeks ago, Balcon Express has amassed customers at times spilling onto Sixth Avenue. Most everyone, per the matriarch’s estimation, tears into a pupusa, usually in the No. 2 combo (two tacos, one pupusa). They are also available a la carte.

A HOMECOMING FOR EL BALCON

The succinct menu, which includes tortas and burritos, is a streamlined version of what they offer at their first restaurant in Bremerton. El Balcon — so named for its earliest, unofficial days on the balcony of the Amayas’ Tacoma apartment — debuted in 2009 as a pop-up tent, serving hordes of hungry shipyard workers, where Mario had gotten a job.

“We started having lines of people,” Amaya recalled.

Their success became their temporary death-knell when other local restaurants, reliant on this lunch break revenue, complained to the city that the Amayas’ tent was too big. They were told to shrink their setup or shut down.

“Then we lost everything,” said Amaya.

Gone from their Tacoma apartment, for several months they lived out of their car with their five children, all under the age of 13 at the time, and occasionally with friends and relatives.

Unbeknownst to them, the shipyard workers started talking. As KUOW reported in 2017, hundreds of them signed their own petition, urging the city to reconsider their standards for food tents. A few of those loyal customers helped them find an apartment in nearby Port Orchard, and El Balcon reclaimed their stake on the sidewalk. Then, one of the business owners showed up with a key.

That little storefront was El Balcon’s home for a decade; the restaurant moved last November to a much larger space in a former Kitsap Bank building at 190 Pacific Ave.

Meanwhile, friends and Tacoma residents Diego and Kristin Sierra had been scheming some way to reconnect the Amayas to their longtime hometown. He is Honduran, and as his wife explained it, “His heart was affected when he ate Ofelia’s food.”

“When Old Milwaukee Cafe closed in 2020,” she continued, “we thought, ‘I think this is our chance.’”

Now they are business partners in the Tacoma venture, and as a teacher and librarian at Lincoln High School, she helps manage their very active social media pages.

For Tacoma — and especially for this stretch rife with bars and several of the city’s best full-service restaurants — Balcon Express fills a need for not just high-quality, quick-serve food but also for a dish that previously required a trip to Lakewood or Federal Way.

You can hear the methodical pat-pat, slap-slap of Amaya and her team crafting their pupusas throughout the day. Ideally the masa rests for a few hours before being handled, but sometimes you run out of pupusas and the only thing to do is to make more.

“It’s the item that we make by hand,” said Amaya, “one by one.”

BALCON EXPRESS - TACOMA

▪ 3102 6th Ave., Tacoma, 253-212-3054, instagram.com/balconexpress

▪ Monday-Saturday 12-8 p.m. (or sell-out)

▪ Details: Salvadoran and Mexican quick-serve from family behind Bremerton’s El Balcon

▪ Menu: pupusas, $4 each or in combo with two tacos, $9; single tacos $2.75-$3; burritos and tortas $9-$12; quesadillas $7

EL BALCON - BREMERTON

▪ 190 Pacific Ave., Bremerton, 360-813-1617, balconexpress.com

▪ Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-8 p.m.

▪ Details: pupusas plus bigger menu that includes specialty tortas, more tacos and asada fries

This story was originally published January 25, 2023 at 5:00 AM.